In business and in the workplace, on the domestic front and in our social lives, we all stand to benefit from more effective communication skills. We crave for more fulfilling interpersonal relationships. This site is dedicated to helping you achieve your goals. New features added continually!

FEATURE OF THE WEEK:

Reading body language: 5 mistakes many people make

Human beings are genetically programmed to look for facial and behavioral cues. We see someone gesture and automatically make a judgment about the intention of that gesture. Indeed, the ability to 'read' nonverbal signals can provide you with crucial information about other people, which will give you a significant advantage in judging how to interact with them in all kinds of situations. But you have to avoid these five common mistakes that lead people right off the track when they attempt to read body language Check out all the details here.

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SEE SAMPLE ISSUE HERE

Extending the aforementioned authors’ notions about organizational approaches for business messages, Stauss and Seidel (2004: 98) suggested a checklist for dealing with dissatisfied customers:

1. Understand complaints as a normal part of your job and as a chance to reduce customer dissatisfaction and to ensure customer retention.

2. Look for a quiet location for the complaint conversation. Do not let other customers listen to the conversation. Offer the customer a seat. Address the customer by name.

3. Signal willingness to talk. Use gestures, eye contact, and body language to convey that you are paying close attention. Offer an apology or at least regret that the customer has had a bad experience. Use the first-person form when formulating responses. (for example: “I am really sorry that you had this inconvenience” or “I apologize for the trouble caused”)

4. Listen carefully. Do not interrupt the complainant. Let the customer speak first without interruption even though the customer may bring up unfounded statements.

5. Conduct the conversation in a calm and courteous manner. Respond calmly to exaggerations and personal accusations. Respond to insults calmly and bring the conversation back to the factual level. Do not argue with the customer and do not engage in a power struggle. An argument with the customer is always won by the customer.

6. Take notes. The activity of writing down what customer says demonstrates to the customer that you are taking the complaint seriously and encourages the customer to explain the circumstances more accurately. Furthermore, the notes are valuable in complaint handling and analysis.

7. Avoid immediate diagnoses and listen to all the information without confessing that you were at fault.

8. Don’t ask questions regarding the contents until the situation becomes completely clear. Pose questions in a courteous manner. (for example: “Thanks for the hint. One more thing I would like to know is…”)

9. Put yourself in the customer’s place. Avoid wording that increase the level of annoyance.

10. If a mistake actually happened, do not blame a colleague, other departments, or the firm in general.

11. Initiate the handling of the complaint immediately. Offer a fair solution.

12. Ask if the customer agrees with the settlement.

13. If a prompt solution is not possible, promise the customer that the case will be thoroughly reviewed and indicate how long it will take before the customer receives a notice. Observe this deadline. If this is despite your best efforts not possible, inform the complainant in a timely manner and explain the reasons.

14. If you are not responsible or you cannot do anything, forward the complaint and see to it that the receipt and handling process is continued according to the customer’s wishes.

15. Conclude the conversation positively.

16. Analyze the complaint case and notify the responsible manager so that the source of the error can be quickly eliminated.

·Communication Skills - Start Here!

Why you need to get your message across

Effective communication is all about conveying your messages to other people clearly and unambiguously. It's also about receiving information that others are sending to you, with as little distortion as possible.

Doing this involves effort from both the sender of the message and the receiver. And it's a process that can be fraught with error, with messages muddled by the sender, or misinterpreted by the recipient. When this isn't detected, it can cause tremendous confusion, wasted effort and missed opportunity.

In fact, communication is only successful when both the sender and the receiver understand the same information as a result of the communication.

By successfully getting your message across, you convey your thoughts and ideas effectively. When not successful, the thoughts and ideas that you actually send do not necessarily reflect what you think, causing a communications breakdown and creating roadblocks that stand in the way of your goals – both personally and professionally.

In a recent survey of recruiters from companies with more than 50,000 employees, communication skills were cited as the single more important decisive factor in choosing managers. The survey, conducted by the University of Pittsburgh’s KatzBusinessSchool, points out that communication skills, including written and oral presentations, as well as an ability to work with others, are the main factor contributing to job success.

In spite of the increasing importance placed on communication skills, many individuals continue to struggle, unable to communicate their thoughts and ideas effectively – whether in verbal or written format. This inability makes it nearly impossible for them to compete effectively in the workplace, and stands in the way of career progression.

Being able to communicate effectively is therefore essential if you want to build a successful career. To do this, you must understand what your message is, what audience you are sending it to, and how it will be perceived. You must also weigh-in the circumstances surrounding your communications, such as situational and cultural context.

Communications Skills – The Importance of Removing Barriers

Problems with communication can pop-up at every stage of the communication process (which consists of the sender, encoding, the channel, decoding, the receiver, feedback and the context – see the diagram below). At each stage, there is the potential for misunderstanding and confusion.

To be an effective communicator and to get your point across without misunderstanding and confusion, your goal should be to lessen the frequency of problems at each stage of this process, with clear, concise, accurate, well-planned communications. We follow the process through below:

Source...

As the source of the message, you need to be clear about why you're communicating, and what you want to communicate. You also need to be confident that the information you're communicating is useful and accurate.

Message...

The message is the information that you want to communicate.

Encoding...

This is the process of transferring the information you want to communicate into a form that can be sent and correctly decoded at the other end. Your success in encoding depends partly on your ability to convey information clearly and simply, but also on your ability to anticipate and eliminate sources of confusion (for example, cultural issues, mistaken assumptions, and missing information.)

A key part of this is knowing your audience: Failure to understand who you are communicating with will result in delivering messages that are misunderstood.

Channel...

Messages are conveyed through channels, with verbal channels including face-to-face meetings, telephone and videoconferencing; and written channels including letters, emails, memos and reports.

Different channels have different strengths and weaknesses. For example, it's not particularly effective to give a long list of directions verbally, while you'll quickly cause problems if you give someone negative feedback using email.

Decoding...

Just as successful encoding is a skill, so is successful decoding (involving, for example, taking the time to read a message carefully, or listen actively to it.) Just as confusion can arise from errors in encoding, it can also arise from decoding errors. This is particularly the case if the decoder doesn't have enough knowledge to understand the message.

Receiver...

Your message is delivered to individual members of your audience. No doubt, you have in mind the actions or reactions you hope your message will get from this audience. Keep in mind, though, that each of these individuals enters into the communication process with ideas and feelings that will undoubtedly influence their understanding of your message, and their response. To be a successful communicator, you should consider these before delivering your message, and act appropriately.

Feedback...

Your audience will provide you with feedback, as verbal and nonverbal reactions to your communicated message. Pay close attention to this feedback, as it is the only thing that can give you confidence that your audience has understood your message. If you find that there has been a misunderstanding, at least you have the opportunity to send the message a second time.

Context...

The situation in which your message is delivered is the context. This may include the surrounding environment or broader culture (corporate culture, international cultures, and so on).

Removing Barriers at All These Stages

To deliver your messages effectively, you must commit to breaking down the barriers that exist within each of these stages of the communication process.

Let’s begin with the message itself. If your message is too lengthy, disorganized, or contains errors, you can expect the message to be misunderstood and misinterpreted. Use of poor verbal and body language can also confuse the message.

Barriers in context tend to stem from senders offering too much information too fast. When in doubt here, less is oftentimes more. It is best to be mindful of the demands on other people’s time, especially in today’s ultra-busy society.

Once you understand this, you need to work to understand your audience’s culture, making sure you can converse and deliver your message to people of different backgrounds and cultures within your own organization, in your country and even abroad

MindTools.com - Join Our Community!

The first skill that you'll learn in this section is 'How to Make a Great First Impression": This is essential if you're going to have the chance to communicate your message. To read this, click 'Next article' below. Other relevant destinations are shown in the "Extension Resources" list underneath.

·Communication Skills to Build Confidence

Dear Master Communicator-in-Making,

Re: Communication Skills explained!

My name is Sri Hari. I have seen many people spend most of their life with the belief that they need fixing and spend thousands on therapy and counseling group sessions and still suffer with the same anxieties and pains.

I am here to help you take control back and enjoy your living y using a few simple skills and techniques which you can start using right away.

What is so great about communication skills?

This is exactly the question that started me off on this adventure. Almost everyone I met had something to say about the way I spoke. When I stopped them and asked "what do you mean by better communication skills?" they would start off with a "You have to.........." and stop dead in their track.

Everybody seems to go into a trance when answering that question. So here, I had a bunch of people who kept telling I do not communicate well, but failed to tell me how to do it better or what to do, to communicate better. Since I could not find a good enough answer, I start my own search.

You must know a few important things before you can become a Good Communicator.

Communication # Words

Quite a few people are surprised at that statement. Communication is definitely not just the words you use. You may have the entire oxford dictionary at the tip of your tongue or may have the president's pin for the biggest vocabulary and still be a bad communicator because you had this wondrous idea that communication means words and more words.

In reality, good communication skills are opposite; it is using lesser words and obtain a greater impact. Communicating well involves using multiple channels that we human have developed over the centuries. Some of them are primal in nature like the body language and some of it acquired over years, like the tone of your voice and then we have the words.

Words actually contribute to about 7% according one famous research. Let us not contest the academics or try to prove that this percentage is correct. The important point is that, communication is made up of more than just words and until you realize that, your chance of becoming good at influencing others is quite slim.

Warning: I am not a nerdy professor sitting at some ancient university behind a nice oak desk and a Harvard degree... if you expect something like that... my friend you are lost...

Why are good communication skills needed?

Most of today's influential people reached the level of success by their sheer skills of influence/ persuasion. However, before you can become good at persuasion and influence, you will first need to step through the basics....

I would suggest you to start with communication test so you can understand your current style and level of skills. Once you get a gist of your present situation, you can then start learning some of the basic rules of good communication.

When you are ready, you can step on to developing your leadership skills and presentation ideas. If you need some help in developing other core skills, we also have a section on distance education, which can help you further your academic skills and improve your job opportunities.

Based on your unique stage of learning, make your choice. If you are not sure what you are looking for, try our customized search... we have customized it to give you the best resources to develop your communication skills.

What to do next to improve my communication skills?

To help our visitors get started on the right note, we have designed a a very effective program called the 3 Steps to Maximize Influence. It has been tested over a few thousand of our visitors and improved based on their feedback.

Thousands have benefited by following our 3 Steps program and you can be one of them. It has three simple steps that you can use today to help you become better at influencing people. I suggest you take the communication skills test, which will then subscribe you to the free 3-step program, a perfect way to start your skills development.

The 3 Steps are,

1. Learn how to Ground yourself to Convert your nervous energy into confidence.

Now you would be more than happy to attend a $500 workshop on this, But I am making available to you for almost free. almost because you need to fill in your email address and name to access this report.

Developing Good communication and Confidence

Developing good communication without developing your confidence is like building just your upper body muscles, not very effective. Therefore, we also have a growing resource of material on developing your confidence and charisma. In fact, as you will discover very soon, confidence is a product of your internal communication.

Confidence is primarily based on your self-talk. If you a person who lashes out at your mistakes, guess what? You are hitting on your own toe…. So developing a good internal communication will be a major boost in developing you confidence. We will show you some simple ways to do that.

What to do Next?

Take the Communication test today to subscribe or if you want to subscribe straight away, go here. Both the Communication Test and the 3 Steps to Maximize Influence course are free of cost.